Still rebuilding

Thus far I have recovered about 2/3 of what I lost in the 100NL fiasco. It's amazing but as soon as I moved down I instantly ran normal again. This crap can really mess with your head.

All-in-all I know I am a better player for having gone through such ridiculous swings. Due to analysis of my play during the last nosedive, I made a couple major tweaks in my game that has really cut down on the variance.

I am looking forward to getting back to 100NL instead of having the normal feeling of dread.

Back to 50NL

I am $900 under AIEV over my first 3k hands at 100NL. This is like a repeat performance of early 2011 where I ran 4k under ev over like 2 months.

I have now lost to a gut shot when all-in 5 straight times... two of those times was on the turn.

Is that even possible? Seriously.. what are the mathematical odds of that happening? I better buy a lottery ticket.

The whales keep trying to hand me their money but the poker Gods won't let them.

Oh well, that's poker.

With 1/3 of my bankroll gone, I am moving down. I am not going to give up. When I hit 3k I will give 100NL another shot. I can't get F@#$@ forever.

Just to cheer myself up...

...here is my 50NL graph from the past few weeks.



I'm going to try and channel that run good mojo going forward. :)

Moving up= you can't win at showdown

After smashing through 50NL with a 12bb/100 win-rate over 30k hands, I finally made it to 100NL.

Excitedly I fired up some tables. There is probably some sub-optimal play here and there as I adjust to the regulars, but overall I feel I played very well.

I wasn't really paying attention to how I was doing, although I did notice that I was losing some races.

After the session I checked the graph and almost threw up.


In 3 short hours I blew a weeks work at 50NL. Good times.

I know that this kinda stuff happens, but it's odd that it seems to always happen as soon as I move up. It happened multiple times at 50NL before I got a foothold, now it here we go again at 100NL.

This is the kinda thing that woulda really bothered me a year ago. Now I know I just need to grind enough hands to turn it around. If I have to move down, oh well.. no biggie. I'll be back at 100NL in a week or two. :)

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(Continued- 2 hrs later)

It's been one of those days where my opponents mystically hit whatever combination of runner runner if all-in on the flop or 1 or 2 outer if all-in on the turn.

This may seem like a small sample, and it is.. but since I only play 2-4 tables at a time, it's like 8 hrs of play today. What a strange game this is.

Well, I'm $200 from having to move down. Almost 1/3 of my BR gone since yesterday :(


I wish somehow this graph showed the 9 times that I flopped the nuts and got all-in on the turn or river only to find out they had turned a gutshot or some other wierd suckout. 9 times. That's a lot of dough.

It's funny though, I haven't run this bad since my first move to 50NL in February. I am not going to get frustrated, tomorrow is a new day.. I'll be back strong then. This is why we practice BR management, no?

I decided to not pay blinds today

Not really, but since I won money in the blinds it almost looks like it. I feel like I played at the top of my game today, even if I can't win a 60/40 or 70/30.

Here's today.



And here are my positional earnings for my entire foray into 50NL on Cake thus far.



BR is now just under $2,400.

I got another odd "CSG" payment into my account from Cake today. It appears as if their rakeback system is slightly off, so from time to time they make up for it by depositing money in player's accounts. This is my theory and I'm sticking to it. If anyone knows the real reason these mystery deposits keep showing up, please feel free to chime in.

A day of run good?

Today I actually ran decent. Although I couldn't win a flip early, things started clicking at about the 3/4 point. BR now stands at about $2,300.



I have been working lately on the light 4-bets. Since I steal more often than any human on earth, I tend to get 3-bet extremely light by conscious regulars. Against a few players I profitably 4-bet ATC. Now who's getting exploited?

Another aspect of my game I have worked on is the dreaded redline. Now about 40% of my earn comes from non-showdown winnings. If you have a free falling redline, I suggest disallowing yourself from calling. This is the best and quickest fix. I oversimplify, but that's the solution is a nutshell.

I'm baaaack

I have slowly but surely began playing again. I deposited $40 on Cake poker over the summer but didn't really start grinding until mid September. Here are my results so far:



50NL positional stats. I don't think I have ever seen anyone else break even/win money from the SB as I have done over the last 60k hands and am very proud of this.


Overall the play on cake is very soft compared to Pokerstars. Maybe this is why my win-rate is so high. Or maybe it's because the traffic is so much lower, I can only play 10 tables at a time now. Either I have improved while building the BR or am just running hot. Time will tell.

The bankroll is currently around $2,100. Another fact I am proud of is that I went from $40 to $2,000 in just over 100 hrs using a very conservative BR management plan.

I plan on beginning to play 100NL once I hit $3,000. The only problem is there are typically only around 3-4 100NL tables running, so obviously I will just start mixing in 100NL tables at 3k. The odd thing is that there are usually more 200NL tables running than 100NL so when I hit 6K I can put in a lot more volume >50NL for sure.

I will not be posting much strategy here. After Pokerstars got shut down in the US, I spent a lot of time studying the game and kind of came up with my own style of play. It is completely different than what anyone else is doing (that I've seen)and seems to be working very well. I'd hate to divulge it here and suddenly have a bunch of n00bs doing it on my tables.

The only thing I will say is that I have worked very hard on figuring out where the money comes from in poker and built my game around that notion. Some of the results of that quest are counter intuitive but nonetheless profitable. Anyone can figure it out if they just put in the time.